UnSouled (16 page)

They round back toward the main house, and Risa’s wrist begins to ache, reminding her that she’ll have to take it easy for a while. Her running from the powers that be will have to slow to a walk for a while. She could think of worse places than this to have to lie low.

FOLLOWING IS A PAID POLITICAL ADVERTISEMENT

“This is actor Kevin Bessinger, asking you to vote no on Initiative 11. Initiative 11—the ‘pound-of-flesh’ law—is not what it appears. It says it will allow for the voluntary shelling of inmates—in other words, the removal and disposal of their brains, followed by the unwinding of the rest of their bodies. It might seem like a sensible idea—until you read what the initiative actually says.

“Initiative 11 states that shelling would be voluntary—but it also allows prison administrators to override that and mandate the shelling of any prisoner they choose. In addition, it brings into the mainstream the unethical black-market practice of selling unwound parts at auction. Do you really want our lawmakers in the black market?

“Vote no on Initiative 11. The pound-of-flesh law is not a solution we can live with.”

—Sponsored by the Coalition for Ethical Unwinding Practices

Dinner that night for Risa is not room service but a feast in the large dining room of the main house. The long table seats two dozen, and Risa is seated toward the middle, after refusing to be seated at the head. CyFi’s fathers, who, Risa learned, had given up lucrative law and dental practices to run the Tyler Walker Foundation, are not present.

“Twice a week we have a special dinner,” CyFi explains. “Just Tyler-folk—no spouses or family. It’s a time just for us—and tonight you get to be one of us.”

Risa’s not sure how to feel about that.

The doctor takes it upon himself to introduce Risa, stealing CyFi’s thunder. He offers Risa up in the best possible light. A loyal member of the ADR forced by the enemy to testify against her own conscience. “She believed that by doing their bidding, she was saving hundreds of kids from being unwound,” the doctor explains, “but in the end she was double-crossed, and those kids are now in harvest camps awaiting ‘summary division.’ Risa is a victim of the system, as we all are, and I, for one, welcome her with open arms.”

Those gathered applaud, although there’s still some reluctance. Risa supposes that’s the best she’s going to get.

The meal is brisket and flavorful home-grown vegetables. It’s like Sunday dinner among a big family. Everyone eats with minimal conversation until CyFi says, “Yo, maybe you all oughta introduce yourselves.”

“Names, or sharings?” someone asks.

“Sharings,” someone else answers. “We might as well tell her the Tyler.”

CyFi begins. “Right temporal lobe.” Then he looks to his left.

Reluctantly the man next to him says, “Left arm.” He holds up his hand and waves.

Then the woman beside him says, “Left leg below the knee.” And around the table it goes:

“Right eye.”

“Left eye.”

“Liver and pancreas.”

“A substantial part of the occipital lobe.”

Part after part is announced until it comes all the way around the table, back to Risa. “Spine,” she says awkwardly. “But I don’t know whose.”

“We could find out for you,” the woman who received Tyler’s heart offers.

“No, that’s all right. I’d rather not know,” Risa tells her. “At least not now, anyway.”

She nods with understanding. “It’s a personal choice—no one will pressure you.”

Risa looks around the table. They’re all still eating, but now the attention is focused on her.

“So . . . every single piece of Tyler Walker is at this table?”

CyFi sighs. “No. We don’t got spleen, left kidney, intestinal tract, thyroid, or any part of his right arm. And there’s also a bunch of smaller brain bits that didn’t have enough of him to feel the pull—but about seventy-five percent of him is here around the table.”

“And the other twenty-five percent can take a flying leap,” says left-auditory-tract man. Everyone laughs.

Risa also learns that the garish decor in every room is also for Tyler. He had an overwhelming attraction to shiny things. Stealing them was part of the reason he was unwound.

“But everything here is bought and paid for,” the Tyler-folk are quick to tell her.

“Does the Tyler Walker Foundation pay you all to stay here?”

“More like the other way around,” the doctor says. “Sure, when we first heard the idea, we were all dubious”—his eyes go a little euphoric—“but when you’re here, in the presence of Tyler, you realize you don’t want to be anywhere else.”

“I sold my home and gave everything to the foundation,” someone else says. “They didn’t ask for it. I just wanted to give it.”

“He’s here with us, Risa,” CyFi tells her. “You don’t have to believe it, but we all do. It’s a matter of faith.”

It’s all too strange, too foreign for Risa to embrace. She thinks of the many other “revival communes” that have sprung up, thanks to the Tyler Walker Foundation. Their existence is
another unexpected consequence of unwinding—a convoluted solution to an even more convoluted problem. She doesn’t fault CyFi or any of these people. Instead she blames the world that made this place necessary. It galvanizes her more than ever to bring an end to unwinding once and for all. She knows she’s only one girl, but she also knows she’s a larger-than-life icon now. People love her, fear her, despise her, revere her. All these elements can make her a force to be reckoned with, if she plays her cards right.

That night, before everyone goes to bed, there’s a ritual that CyFi lets her witness.

“We played with a bunch of ideas—silly stuff mostly—like lying on the ground in the shape of a body, in our respective positions. Or huddling together in a little room, all squeezed in like clowns in a car, to reduce the space between us. But all that crap just felt weird. In the end we settled upon this circle. Simpler is better.”

The circle, which is at the center of the garden, is marked by stones, each one engraved with the name of a part—even the parts that aren’t there have a place. Everyone sits in front of their respective stone, and someone—anyone—begins to speak. There seem to be no rules beyond that. It’s a free-for-all, and yet they never seem to speak over one another. Risa notices that it’s the people who got Tyler’s brain that seem to motivate most of the conversation, but everyone participates.

“I’m pissed off,” someone says.

“You’re always pissed off,” someone else responds. “Let it go.”

“I shouldn’t have stolen all that stuff.”

“But you did, so get over it.”

“I miss Mom and Dad.”

“They unwound you.”

“No! I can stop them. It’s not too late.”

“Read my lips: They . . . unwound . . . you!”

“I feel sick to my stomach.”

“I’m not surprised the way you scarfed down that brisket.”

“It tasted like Grandma’s.”

“It was. I convinced Mom to give us the recipe.”

“You talked to her?”

“Well, to her lawyer.”

“It figures.”

“I remember Mom’s smile.”

“I remember her voice.”

“Remember how cold she was toward the end?”

“Sorry, not part of my memory.”

“There’s so much stuff I wanna do, but I can’t remember what it was.”

“I remember at least one thing. Skydiving.”

“Yeah, like that’s gonna happen.”

“Maybe it will,” says CyFi. Then he asks, “How many of you would skydive for Tyler?”

About half the hands go up immediately, then a bunch more with mild reluctance. There are only a couple of holdouts.

“Great,” says CyFi. “It’s a done deal. I’ll have the dads make the arrangements. Tyler’s going skydiving!”

Risa feels like the ultimate outsider, and she can’t help but feel these people are deluding themselves . . . but she also can’t help but wonder if maybe, just maybe, Tyler is really here in some real but immeasurable way. Whether it’s an illusion or not, she’ll never know. Like CyFi said, it’s a matter of faith.

One thing’s for sure, though. If Tyler really is “present,” then he’s got a lot of growing up to do. Risa wonders if a divided person
can
grow up. Or if they’re stuck at the age at which they were unwound.

When the circle chat is through, CyFi walks Risa back to
her room, and Risa can’t keep herself from giving at least one opinion.

“It’s all well and good what you’re playing at here, Cyrus,” Risa says, “but when you stood in front of Congress and fought for the Cap-17 law, you were doing something truly important.”

“Yeah—and look what good it did. We got Cap-17 through, and now there are even more crackdowns by the Juvies and ads convincing people what a good thing unwinding is. They use all our good intentions against us—you should know that more than anyone. I’m pretty damn smart, but no way am I smart enough to beat that.”

“That doesn’t mean you give up trying. Now what are you doing? Nothing but indulging the childish whims of a troubled unwound kid.”

“Watch yourself, Risa,” CyFi warns. “People have given up a lot to indulge that troubled kid.”

“Well, then, maybe Tyler needs someone to tell him to man up.”

“And that person is you, I suppose?”

“I don’t see anyone else doing it. You’re all fixated on what Tyler was and what he wanted before he got himself unwound. Why don’t you start thinking about what he’d want three years later?”

For once, CyFi has no wisecrack answer. But Tyler does.

“You suck,” Tyler says out of CyFi’s mouth. “But yeah, I’ll think about it.”

FOLLOWING IS A PAID POLITICAL ADVERTISEMENT

“My name is Captain Lance Reitano, and I’m a decorated firefighter. Let me tell you why I’m voting yes on Initiative 11. By the voluntary shelling and unwinding of violent offenders, Initiative 11 provides crucial tissues and organs—and the initiative has a provision allowing burn victims to receive them for free. When you’ve been in the field as long as I have, you know how important that is.

“Opponents of Initiative 11 claim some sort of ‘moral high ground’—but you want to know the truth? They’re the ones with an unethical agenda. They, and the Juvenile Authority, want Initiative 11 to fail, because they want to repeal the Cap-17 law instead. Not only that, but these same self-serving billionaires are fighting for a constitutional amendment that would bump the legal age of unwinding all the way up to 19, allowing even more kids to be unwound—which would increase their profits and their stranglehold on the organ industry.

“I don’t know about you, but I’d rather see a killer unwound than the kid next door. Vote yes on Initiative 11!”

—Sponsored by Patriots for Sensible Shelling

Although Risa had resolved to stay a second week, her antsiness, and desire to
do
something becomes overwhelming. On her eighth day, she decides to leave.

“Where will you go?” CyFi asks as he escorts her to the main road. “If the ADR is the full-on mess you say it is, do you even have a place to go?”

“No,” she admits, “but I’ll take my chances out there. There’s got to be someone left in the ADR. If not, I’ll start my own Anti-Divisional Resistance.”

“Sounds pretty iffy to me.”

“My whole life’s been iffy—why should this be any different?”

“All right, then,” says CyFi. “You take care of yourself, Risa, and if you happen to run into Lev, tell him to come on by. I’ll cook some nice old-fashioned smorgasbash.” CyFi smiles. “He’ll know what it means.”

17 • Argent

Argent Skinner’s left cheek is torn. Not beyond repair, but beyond any repair he can afford. Three jagged rifts, now stitched together like a baseball, spread out from beneath his eye to below his ear. Another inch and it would have cut his carotid artery. Maybe he wishes it had. Maybe he wishes his hero had taken his life, because then, in some twisted way, Argent and Connor Lassiter would be connected forever. Then he would not have to face the fallout from what should have been the greatest event of his meager existence.

The idea of Grace on the run with Connor is something he just can’t wrap his mind around. The two of them taking off like some ridiculous Bonnie and Clyde would make Argent laugh if he weren’t so lethally pissed off. He had the Akron AWOL in his damn cellar! For just a moment he had the world at his feet—or at least in kicking distance. Now what does he have?

When he showed up for his shift the next morning, half his face in a bandage, customers and coworkers all feigned to care.

“Oh my, what happened?” they all asked.

“Gardening accident,” he told them, because he couldn’t come up with anything better at the time.

“Wow, musta been one nasty hedge.”

At home he stews, he curses, then stews some more, for what else can he do? Argent knows he can’t tell the police the truth of what happened. He can’t tell anyone, because his fool friends have bigger mouths than he does. The Juvenile Authority and FBI have dismissed him as a dumbass yokel who concocted a lie and almost made it stick. They see him as a joke.
Even his own half-wit sister managed to turn him into a joke of a man, and all because of Connor Lassiter.

Can you despise your personal hero?

Can you long to share in his light and at the same time want to slit his throat the way he almost slit yours?

Argent’s only consolation is that Grace is no longer his problem. He doesn’t have to feed her; he doesn’t have to scold her and make her mind. He doesn’t have to worry about her leaving the water running, or the gas on, or the freaking back door open for the raccoons. He can have his own life. But what is that life, really?

Argent knows that these thoughts will fill his head for months to come as he mindlessly scans canned corn and pocket-damp coupons. “Did you find everything okay?” his mouth will say. “Have a good one!” But his heart will be wishing them worms in their meat, disease in their produce, and swollen, rancid canned goods. Anything that will inflict upon them a small fraction of the misery that now resides within him.